LONGMONT -- Three years in, the annual community event known as the G'Knight Ride has become an all-day affair and is expected to attract nearly triple the crowd on Saturday that it had its first year.

As of Thursday morning about 1,900 people had registered for one of the three rides Saturday evening -- 12-, 3- or 1-mile routes -- and about 30 percent of the total usually show up to register the day-of, so Bicycle Longmont board member Scott Conlin said he's expecting about 3,000 riders.

The first year drew about 1,200 total participants and last year had about 2,000 riders and another 300 that showed up to hang out in the Oskar Blues beer garden or enjoy the live music, according to Ryan Kragerud, president of Bicycle Longmont.

Oskar Blues is the title sponsor of the event, as it also has a beer named G'Knight, named after the late Gordon Knight, a Lyons resident and wildland firefighter who died fighting the Big Elk Fire in 2002.

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This is the biggest fundraising event of the year for Bicycle Longmont, which promotes a variety of cycling activities in the city, including the weekly Wednesday night bike rides.

For the first time, the G'Knight Ride is being based at Roosevelt Park in downtown Longmont. Last year the ride was headquartered at Prospect Park.

"We basically had gotten feedback from people last year and they were saying they wanted more grass, and when we came up with the idea for the G'Knight Ride we had wanted to move it around Longmont," Kragerud said.

The city welcomed the idea of having it as Roosevelt, he added.

The day begins at noon with same-day registration and the activity continues all day long, culminating in the early evening with the actual rides and live musical performances. KUNC, Colorado Public Radio, has been a sponsor in the past and will be again, but this year KBCO, formerly of Boulder but now located in the Denver Tech Center, signed on as a sponsor, bringing in a significant amount of additional exposure through its hundreds of thousands of listeners.

"We're drawing people from as far north as Fort Collins and as far south as Denver," Kragerud said.